Morejon's Poetic "Persona": Representations of Pan-Caribbean Women

Much has been written of the representation of the Afro-Cuban woman in Morejón's poetics, particularly as a representation of her subjectivity since the inception of the Cuban revolution. As Janet Hampton has noted, poems like "Madre," "La cena," "Renacimiento," and "Mujer Negra" counter objective images of women found in Spanish American literature, revealing instead a Black woman who "is active, not passive; resistant, not submissive; regenerative, not destructive. She symbolizes the history of the Afro-Cuban people, the continuity of tradition and an optimistic vision of the future of her country" (170). While Morejón's presentations of Cuban women's reality specifically highlight the historically marginalized Afro-Cuban experience, she also presents a conceptualization of women's empowerment that goes beyond national boundaries. As she states in her interview with Elaine Fido:

I think it is very important in these times for us to read Caribbean literature written by women because in our tradition we have had the male view of the Caribbean and we have to recognize now that these male views have been sometimes only sexual: a view that has limited women to sex. I believe women writers or Black women writers in the Caribbean and everywhere give a very special touch to their literature.

(Morejón, "A Womanist Vision" 266)

For Morejón, women's experience is marked by two important characteristics. The first is its ability to give voice to an identity not constrained by patriarchal ideas of the feminine as solely sexual in nature. Secondly, their experiences create a community of Caribbean women who use the word as a mirror of their historical realities, cultural realities, and desires. Nonetheless, in describing this solidarity Morejón rejects more common uses of the label "feminist," opting instead for a "womanist" optic, as used by Alice Walker. Such a term connects women's experience to society and history. As Howe notes:

When Morejón adopts Walker's concept, she emulates traditional Caribbean cross-cultural exchange to legitimize her appropriation of an Afro-American writer's theory. In other words, Morejón's critical position has implications that go far beyond her prorevolutionary stance vis-à-vis capitalist consumer societies such as the United States. She reinforces her own critical womanist view by focusing on the Afro-Cuban woman's specific situation and breaking the perimeters of Cuba's racial and gender policies.

(158)

Alongside a womanist representation of the Afro-Cuban woman's experience—and its questioning of feminism, as Linda Howe has noted—is a larger vision of woman "still in process" in the poetic work of Nancy Morejón. This "woman" is not one—a Cuban woman—but in fact many—the women of the Caribbean who, while united by gender, are distinguished by specific historical and social particularities that defy facile gender conflations and homogenous representations of a unified female voice.

Throughout Morejón's oeuvre, there is a persistent reference to diverse women that extends beyond a conception of womanism applied only within national boundaries. Who are these Caribbean women placed on the page as subjects, given a voice through their poetry and who, therefore resist invisibility? A close look at Morejón's work reveals some important characteristics of her womanist philosophies as applied to a pan-Caribbean context. The women she refers to both intersect and diverge in connections of individuality and community. While their specific histories may differ, they are nonetheless united by experiences of marginalization and struggles for subjectivity.

This study will focus on three poems by Nancy Morejón in order to illustrate the ways in which the women of the Caribbean represented in her work serve as examples of survival, resistance, and strength beyond limiting patriarchal categories of passive female behavior or an essentialized feminine identity. The model for my analysis of this Pan-Caribbean woman is Morejón's application of Walker's theory of womanism and her poetic conception of female solidarity as illustrated in the poem "Persona." From this complex solidarity I will then look at the poems "Granadina" and "Escrito, Al Final del Siglo, Para...